We said we [hearted] them before. And we still do. We especially [heart] this post: Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor.

As they note:

“Software development is rarely a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s multiple marathons, actually. So trying to extract 110% performance from today when it means having only 70% performance available tomorrow is a bad deal. You end up with just 77% of your available peak. What a bad trade.”

You could substitute “business” for “software development” and that statement still holds true. It’s just common sense. Enough sleep = better performance. Ask any tired, overworked individual at any company and they’ll tell you if they got a little more sleep, they would be a lot more effective.

So why doesn’t common sense prevail? The problem is that one person’s common sense doesn’t stand a chance against the culture of a workplace. When managers reward employees for showing “dedication” by coming in early and working late, then the company will make those bad trades that the 37Signals blog talks about. As long as your work culture honors people putting in hours rather than people driving results, then sleep deprivation will always be a badge of honor.
We are reminded of a line from Men in Black (quote is courtesy the Internet Movie Database) when Will Smith’s character asks Tommy Lee Jones’ character why the truth about aliens living among us must be kept from the general public.

Will Smith: “Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.”
Tommy Lee Jones: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

We were pleased to see this post from Mojo Mom about SWAT (”smart women with available time”) teams. The context is Sue Shellenbarger’s story in the Wall Street Journal about an experimental project (running business simulations) at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler business school. As Mojo Mom notes, these simulations only happen occasionally, “so Kenan-Flagler needed executive-level talent that could assemble at a moment’s notice to work on an intense but brief project.”

Mojo Mom was one of the project’s participants. Not only did she rock it, but she knows she rocked it:

“When you think of ’stay-at-home Mom’ versus ‘MBA student,’ a stereotypical image might be minnows swimming with sharks. It was good to confront that image because when it came right down to it, I actually felt more like the shark. Because the MBA students are very smart, we might forget that most of them have not been in the working world for more than a few years. Compared to a twentysomething, I have come to appreciate the life experience I have accumulated through every work and family challenge I have faced.”

We would love to see more statements like this be part of our national conversation about work and life. Having a kid and being a parent is not a business liability.  It’s bad enough that we stigmatize women for not being “available” after they have kids. But we also sell them short for not being as capable. The irony is that having children, like any major life experience, presents challenges that can make you stronger and smarter and better. If we dropped the labels and focused on what people could accomplish, we’d have SWAT (and SMAT) teams all over the place.

We’d like to offer a big thanks to Matt Metzgar for setting up this public ROWE forum. We couldn’t be happier. Ever since the beginning of ROWE, we have talked about how great it would be if people took this idea and ran with it. Of course we joined, and of course we’ll be following along, but this isn’t our baby. We started this conversation about how to fix the problem of work, but the ultimate outcome belongs to everyone.

We hope this forum starts to answer the question that people ask us all the time, “What can I do to get in a ROWE?” One of the things you can do is participate in the larger conversation about ROWE and work. This happened at Best Buy in the early days of ROWE. Even when not many teams were ROWE, people were talking and those conversations helped change the culture.

For example, in the early days, if someone found out you were ROWE, they might say, “You’re doing that ROWE thing, aren’t you? How do you like working from home?” The misconception created an opportunity. The person in a ROWE would say, “It’s not really about working from home. I still come in, but I don’t have to come in unless it drives results.”

The non-ROWE employee might not believe them, or they might think there was a catch. But at least the idea was out there. When the non-ROWE employee kept hearing messages like these, her mind started to open up. Later, when it was time for her to transition into a ROWE, she was already a little farther along than if people had remained silent.

That’s how social change works. It’s slower than other kinds of change because you have to change how people think. But it’s possible. Just ask the people at Best Buy and J.A. Counter. They’re living the end result of all that talk.

We thought we’d give a bump to Kelly Forrister’s recent entry on her Simply GTD (Getting Things Done) blog about David Allen’s 3-Fold nature of work:

Doing Pre-defined Work (choosing from what’s already processed and organized on your lists and calendar)
Doing Work as it Appears (responding to latest, loudest and new opportunities)
Defining Work (your own processing and reviewing time)

We’ve found that in corporate America, the second category gets the most attention. At Best Buy, we called them “fire drills” and, like the name suggests, the “latest, loudest” opportunities were often false alarms. Just like in school, everyone lined up single file, marched where the teachers (we mean leaders) told us to march, and then went back to our regular jobs once the all-clear was sounded.

ROWE changed all that. In a ROWE, every employee has the right (even the obligation) to challenge a request to interrupt their work. Because the focus is on results, people are empowered to ask the kind of questions you ask when you feel a sense of ownership in the business:

Is this perceived emergency a genuine emergency?

If it is, does dropping everything I’m doing right now best serve the results we’re trying to drive, or can it wait?

If it can’t wait, then what can we do in the future to make sure this kind of emergency doesn’t happen again? Can we plan better so we’re not in crisis mode the next time this issue comes up?

This is all commonsense stuff. However, if the people in an organization aren’t using a ROWE mindset, then they don’t get the opportunity to use commonsense. Of course real emergencies are always going to come up. But what if more of the work you did fell into categories one and three? What if you first defined work and then spent your day doing the pre-defined work you established for yourself the day, week or month before?

And for those of you who want to jump on this notion with comments about the chaotic nature of the global, 24/7 economy we have this question:

How much of any of the challenges we face today as businesspeople are perceived challenges? And how many of them are just the same old business concerns with a bright, shiny, technological face on them? In other words, how much of the world is genuinely on fire?

Seth Godin recently ran an excerpt from his book Free Prize Inside that got us thinking about fear in the workplace. Godin finds the root of workplace angst in Henry Ford’s decision to pay workers based on productivity rather than replacement value. His take is that we’re insecure in our jobs because deep down we know that we’re replaceable.

We’d like to add another source of our insecurity. When you go into work today you have two responsibilities. One is to get your job done. The other is to meet the cultural expectations of your workplace. The cultural expectations are the unwritten rules and codes that add a layer of complexity to your job. Some of those cultural expectations may include:

1. Being on time

2. Showing obedience to your boss

3. Using certain buzzwords or slogans

4. Sending ideas up through “proper channels”

Not all cultural expectations are bad. There are work cultures that genuinely value transparency, innovation, community involvement, and so forth.

But there are also cultural expectations that are crippling and destructive. If you’re stuck in a workplace that has any of the unwritten rules we mentioned above, then you know what we mean.

Take the relatively common example of a workplace that strictly enforces traditional working hours. You may be absolutely terrific at your job, but if you’re not on time every day (or if you leave “early” one day) then you’re branded a bad worker. So you have to be afraid of your kids taking too long to get ready. You have to be afraid of catching a bad break during your commute. You have to be afraid of something coming up in your life that might require you to leave at 4:00 instead of 5:00.

You’re afraid of being replaced not only because someone else could do your job, but because someone else might be more willing to tolerate the culture. We wonder how much workplace insecurity out there actually has to do with people worrying about not being able to do their jobs. How many people are in over their heads when it comes to the task at hand? And how many people feel like they’re drowning because of the culture of their workplace? Let us know.

Monster.com’s blog is running a contest that asks the eternal question: Is Your Job Like a Sitcom? Judging by the responses so far (contest ends May 5th), the answering seems to be that yes, most people’s jobs are pretty much like a sitcom.

Just check out this excerpt from a contest entry about life at a small brokerage firm:

“Usually at any time of the day they have what is known as their alley. This alley begins at my desk and goes past the assistants. This alley is used for football, soccer and softball practice. I usually am ducking half the day while on the phone trying to work. The ball hits me in the head and I just keep right on talking. There is a five dollar fee for any direct hits to me or the items on my desk!”

So this poor woman goes to work every day and things are so out of control, her only recourse is to charge money when she gets hit by a poorly thrown football.

As one of the entrants notes, “At the end of the day, there are a million stories in these buildings and no one would believe any of them because we live the stories and we can’t believe them ourselves.” That sentence (and the football-dodging worker’s story) sum up the challenge facing all of us. Your workplace’s culture, no matter how broken, still operates almost invisibly. The daily indignities and absurdities are so commonplace that you barely notice them. You might even feel embarrassed to complain about them. It’s just the way it is, right?

What a lot of people might not realize is that cultures can change. You can complain, especially if you have a reasonable alternative. Even if you aren’t in a position to implement ROWE, you still have the right to talk to your manager or your coworkers about results. What exactly are we trying to accomplish here? What can we all do to drive those outcomes? And can you please talk to those guys about “the alley”? Because there is work to do.

We don’t just preach about the joys of a Results-Only Work Environment. We live them every day. And so we’d like to offer a story of our own ROWE.  As we mentioned before, we’re currently working on the ROWE Launch Kit: Office Edition, a tool we’re creating so teams, departments and organizations can transform their workplace from one that focuses on time and physical presence, to one that focuses only on results. To make this happen, we have assembled a team of writers, designers, manufacturers, project managers and so forth. The expectation is that they will drive outcomes on their own, without constant supervision, or scheduled check-ins, or tons of meetings.

Of course, we still meet. But meetings work a little differently in a ROWE, where one of the rules (we call them Guideposts) is that Every Meeting is Optional. Last Friday, we called a meeting to review some materials from the printer. What happened will give you an idea of a ROWE in action.

1. The entire Kit team was invited, but not everyone came. Key people (designer, creative director, etc.) showed up because they knew their input was essential. We trusted them to recognize this fact, and they came through. In a ROWE, people treat the business as their own. You don’t have to mark the meeting “mandatory.” People are adults. They get it.

2. We covered for the people who didn’t make it. Even though the project manager wasn’t there, that didn’t mean that we didn’t cover project management issues. When those points came up, another member of the team stepped up and filled that role. A ROWE naturally creates this kind of cross-functional performance. I fill in for you at this meeting, because I know you’ll fill in for me the next time I’m not present.

3. Some people stayed for the whole hour; others didn’t. The outcome of the meeting was to finalize color and proofread some content. The designer was only responsible for the color, so once that was done, he left. The rest of us stayed for another 45 minutes. When design issues came up later in the meeting, we handled it the same as we did with the project management issues. The team figured it out. What we couldn’t figure out we put in an e-mail to the designer, who answered our questions later that day. If it were something urgent, we could have called him. He has a phone.

4. No one questioned where the missing people were. We were getting results. Period. What does it accomplish to gossip about the whereabouts of the “missing” team members?

5. We had fun. Because we don’t meet as often, or have as many meetings, the meetings we have are productive and fun. No one in that coffee shop had sat through four pointless, overly long meetings already that day. Everyone was cheerful, rested and fresh.

Every Meeting is Optional does not mean that no one meets anymore. Or that no one cares. In fact, anyone walking past our table would have looked at us and thought, “Oh, they’re having a perfectly ordinary, everyday, normal business meeting.”

With one small difference.

None of us looked like we’d rather be dead.

One of the risks of getting wrapped up in your own world is that you get  . . . well . . . wrapped up in your own world. Which is why we are grateful to Tim Walker for his post about relying on your brain instead of relying on technology.

We spend a lot of time talking about how technology frees people to work whenever they want and from anywhere. And it’s true: part of what makes a Results-Only Work Environment so successful is the widespread availability of laptops and cell phones.

But technology isn’t the whole story. In a ROWE, the point isn’t to see who can get the most done over e-mail, or who can stay out of the office the longest, or who can work from the most remote location. Technology gives people the power to live “untethered,” but if they’re not putting results first, then they’re not living up to the promise of ROWE.

A workplace that had zero technology could still be a ROWE. People could still do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work got done. They could still decline meeting invitations where the desired outcome of the meeting wasn’t clear. They could still challenge their boss to give them meaningful goals, rather than thirty things that would be nice to accomplish that year. They could still serve the customer and not the clock.

We call this using the “ROWE mindset.” It’s a way of looking at work and the world and solving problems based on what needs to get done, not our assumptions about how work needs to get done. Technology just makes it all shiny and pretty.

. . . and yet still so close.

When we first started working on the framework for what would become a Results-Only Work Environment, we didn’t have a language for what we were trying to say. We knew that work was deeply dysfunctional, and that people had all kinds of strange beliefs about time and how work gets done, but we didn’t have the vocabulary for it that we have now. So when we needed to explain ourselves, we knew we could always point at a Dilbert comic.

This recent post on Scott Adams’ blog reminded us of those early days. Because even though we’re deep in our own world of ROWE, some things haven’t changed. It’s still all about giving people control over their time. It’s about giving them real choices for how they live their lives.

Adams gives three satiric choices for how people can wisely manage their time:

1. Become independently wealthy

2.  Don’t eat or sleep

3. Live for the moment, but be prepared to live on cat food when you retire.

He’s kidding, but some of the comments are no joke. It’s scary to think that, for a lot of people, the idea of actually having control over your life seems as likely as winning the lottery.

A quick post today to answer a question that we get a lot (and one that has recently bubbled up through the comments on this blog):

This Results-Only Work Environment thing sounds great. So where do I go to work in one?

Right now, there are two authentic ROWEs: Best Buy, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small investment firm located in Wisconsin. We are currently working with other companies (whose names we can’t disclose yet) on migrating them from a traditional work environment to a ROWE. We are also developing a kit that will let teams, departments and organizations make this transformation themselves. (Not a commercial . . . just sayin’.)

But we can’t do it alone. And it’s not going to happen overnight. Right now ROWE is an idea. Before ROWE get on the menu of choices for job seekers, it’s going to have to become a movement.

We realize this is a tall order. But there are small, daily steps that people can take to make ROWE a reality. First and foremost: talk to people. You don’t need to be preachy. It’s more a matter of asking the right questions. Why are we so obsessed with time? Why do we spend our lives in wasteful meetings? Why don’t we focus more on results?

Trite but true: the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging that there is one. If we can get enough people to be actively fed up with the status quo, then we have a fighting chance of changing it.